slowclap

Slowclap Design Philsophy: Privacy

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today I want to talk about privacy and the ways I designed slowclap specifically to respect yours.

First off I want to talk about why I felt this was important in the first place. Our data is bought and sold at alarming scale, and even when we do our best to opt out, it’s increasingly difficult to avoid being tracked everywhere. Most well meaning companies make a pledge not to sell your data, but still go on tracking and storing an alarming amount of your personal information. Which maybe is fine, as long as you trust your government and that the platform won’t get hacked. You do trust both of those, right?

Now maybe claps aren’t a huge risk to expose, but who you clap might be. What if you’re a trans kid living with an intolerant family and applauding someone who is helping you through that? What if an investigative journalist joins and is exposing corruption in your home country and you want to support them?

More innocently, what if you want to support someone anonymously because you don’t want it to be about you.

There have been other platforms trying to achieve a similar goal to slowclap in the past, and many of them have gone the route of tracking where you browse and allocating support without active user choice.

There’s benefits to this model. You can subscribe once and not have to think about it again and feel confident you’re helping indies and creatives organically. There’s less friction. Maybe the sales pitch for creators is even a bit easier. Passive Income!

But that model also requires tracking your browsing history. Privacy isn’t the main reason views aren’t my primary way of allocating support. I think active, opt-in, appreciation is the best way to fight back against the attention economy. But Privacy did play a huge part in this decision.

In fact, one of my early design concepts used views as the fallback for unallocated applause. But once I realized the privacy implications, I knew it wasn’t the right call.

So let’s talk about the ways slowclap does respect your privacy. It starts with account creation. The unique display names are meant to be memorable and fun but they’re also meant to be deliberately unlinked to any other online/offline identity you’ve created. Yes, you can use “links” and “communities” to identify yourself and improve discoverability, but those are opt in. If you’re working across domains and use your Slowclap account in both. The only way someone would know is if they happen to be supporting you in both domains. And when you support, at most, your unique display-name is shared. If you want someone to know it’s you, add a link, if you don’t. That’s the default.

The default actually goes even further. When applauding, your display-name isn’t shared unless you want it to be (you can change this in settings or on the fly for individual applause events. If you don’t decide otherwise, They won’t see “friendly-corncob applauded you” they’ll see “someone applauded you” If friendly-corncob decides to share that they applauded (either with you directly or through a share card) they can, but again it’s opt-in.

Again the goal of this isn’t to inhibit your ability to share your applause or your socials or websites, it’s to keep you in control over what’s shared and when.

Secure mode goes even further and doesn’t store your sender-id when you applaud. There’s some downsides to functionality in this mode (applause can’t auto-allocate, you can’t share that you applauded, etc) but if you applaud in secure mode, it’s actually impossible for me to see who you’ve applauded. I can see that applause happened, but even if my database ever got compromised, there would be nothing linking you to that applause. I don’t think secure mode is necessary for most people, but it is there if you want it.

Some of these decisions (and their consequences) might make slowclap feel a bit less intuitive at first, but that’s only because respecting users isn’t really the norm that we’re used to. Obviously I want slowclap to feel social and fun and community minded, but I want that to be driven by active, informed, decisions made by users, and I think this design is the best way to achieve that.

support this post on 👏 slowclap

Slowclap Update: Events

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Massive update to slowclap today that’s all about making it easier for you track, generate, and celebrate support! It breaks down into 3 features:

✨ events
🎉 goals
🤝 and sharing

✨ events

the old utilitarian view of your applause sent and received has been replaced with a new unified timeline that makes it much easier to understand how much applause you sent/received, where it came from (if they opted to share) and when. This system also dynamically batches applause as it gets further in the past so individual small applause from the same sender will only overwhelm this feed when it’s so recent as to be relevant and fun to see.

🎉 goals

building off this is a system that’s designed to be a fun challenge for you and your community, make it feel less crappy asking for support, and also circumvent the need for paywalls. Goals are automatically generated based on the applause you’ve currently received and reset monthly. Once you achieve one goal, you unlock the next. Your most recently achieved goal and the one you’re working towards are both displayed on your account page.

Paywalls are a pretty common part of patronage platforms and I personally hate them. I think they often push weird obligations, transactionalize relationships that should be supportive, and require platform lock in or APIs that are detrimental to the decentralized, indie web.

Goals are a much better solution IMO, rather than letting people unlock some extra feature if they pay you enough, have your community work together to unlock something for everyone. If we can get to 10000 applause this month, I’ll post an extra story! I’ll do a behind the scenes video if we reach 5000 applause! Yes this works better at higher goal tiers, but I wanted these to feel achievable for everyone no matter where they are in building an audience and I think it’s a fun approach for that!

building off both these systems, there’s now a share button next to each goal and event that will generate a custom share card for any platform that supports them, automatically linking back to where you’d expect.

These share cards are dynamic, describe the event and goal being shared IN the image (the part that people actually look at on share cards) and they respect your custom theme!

I’m really proud of these features and how they streamline asking for support, celebrating support received (or given) and provide more clarity to Slowclap creators. I hope they continue to extend my goal of making Slowclap the best platform for creators to get support without spending all their energy managing a separate patronage business. I hope you’ll try them out!

I will stress these features are in beta and may have bugs! Please let me know if anything isn’t working properly, and expect more updates to these features soon!

support this post on 👏 slowclap

Slowclap Update: Themes

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited to announce a new update to slowclap that is designed to make it even easier for subscribers to make their slowclap page their own. It’s called themes. Anyone subscribed to any slowclap tier can customize their applause page to utilize one of eight custom themes with more to come! Anyone who visits your site will see that theme regardless of whether or not they’re a subscriber!

If you’re not a subscriber yet, you can still check them out by going to slowcla.app/account/manage and scrolling down a bit (it’s near where you add links and join communities). Don’t see any you like? Let me know what you do like and I’ll factor that in to future theme designs.

This is slowclap’s first “premium” feature, and I don’t intend to add many, as I’ve mentioned, my goal is to build slowclap into a community of creators supporting each other and people supporting the open web. I’m hoping to extend these themes to the share cards that appear when you post slowclap links on social networks as well, but that is part of a larger update that’s adding more customization to those cards. Stay tuned and thank you all for being a part of the community!

support this post on 👏 slowclap

Slowclap Design Philosophy: Decentralization

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s design philosophy post is about decentralization. Which means that today’s design philosophy post is actually about you.

I know that some of this is just nostalgia, but I think a lot of people miss the early days of the internet. Maybe for you it was Tripod (like me) maybe it was Geocities, maybe it was MySpace. Maybe it was the early days of YouTube or JustinTV.

A time when it felt like you were a part of something.

Of course, none of these were in the actual early days of the internet, and all of them happened at different times for different people, but I hope most of you have still had a moment where you thought to yourself: “Wow, I can just… build something. I can do this.”

We’ve polished that away, under the false pretense that joining some one-click platform provides us ease of use. That it eliminates friction.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it’s easier to make your own website than it is to sign up for a social network. That’s obviously not true.

But what I will say is that I think what’s largely happened is the complexity hasn’t been eliminated, it’s just been deferred. If your goal is to find something interesting to read or watch, is that really any easier now? I can certainly find more stuff, but if anything better feels so much further away.

If your goal is to create. . . yes, there are unique challenges. Building a website is better if you learn to write HTML (or Markdown) and make it yourself. There’s an up front cost, and depending on how and where you deploy it there’s also often some recurring costs too. (Though if you’re willing to learn, those costs go way down). Compared to that, making a new social media account and posting on it is much quicker and easier.

But now your stuff is their stuff. We’re trading convenience for ownership, and it’s not actually that much more convenient! I’m not saying that social networks don’t have their uses. Before I moved them here, my design philosophy posts started on Mastodon and Bluesky. A big part of discoverability is being where people are, talking about what you do and how people can support you for doing it. If you’re an artist or writer or indie dev, that’s the job.

And the unfortunate truth is, there’s no platform you can sign up for that makes that job much easier.

Algorithmic discovery isn’t there to help you. It’s there to help the platform. Yes, audience building might go a bit faster if you’re consolidating on a popular platform, but that audience is fragile. It’s not your audience, its their audience.

What’s happened is that the modern internet has turned into a slot machine. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of an audience or looking to build one. It’s gambling either way. Maybe I can game the algorithm to boost my reach. Maybe today video posts get more visibility. Maybe today it’s posting using that brand new feature that just so happens to extract more value from your eyeballs. Maybe today it’s rage. . . Maybe every day it’s rage.

Does any of this help you?

Let me propose an alternative.

Instead of focusing the bulk of your energy on feeding your creativity, your passion, your drive into some content farm that’s there to use you to further its own ends. Build something resilient. Build a website. Then build a community. Your community.

I’m not here to tell you that it’s easier. But I do think I can safely promise that it’s better.

Enter Slowclap

I’ve said in the past that I designed slowclap to function as an “anti-platform”. Most other platforms, whether they be for patronage, social networking, or sharing the stuff you create are all trying to consolidate your work in a place that they own. I’m trying to do the opposite. I don’t think the world needs another centralized social network. Everything about slowclap’s design is about getting you elsewhere. This is antithetical to how businesses on the internet build, and it’s going to be one of the biggest challenges to overcome in turning this platform into something meaningful. If you’re not constantly logging into slowclap to check in on your friends and your community. . . if instead you’re going to their websites and they’re going to yours, how is anyone going to remember to applaud?

I think even well intentioned platforms fall into this trap. It’s much easier to keep people involved and invested if there’s a constant pull to log in and interact with your platform. But I think this is a challenge that’s worth figuring out ways to overcome. I think that, in this case, the hard path is worth it. Yes that means that slowclap is going to be more reliant on you to talk about it. Reliant on you to encourage people to sign up and support the entire community. That’s the point. The only way I can think of to empower you is to give you the power.

I assume that will mean slower growth. I assume that will make buy in harder. But it’s in pursuit of making it easier for you to build a website, easier for you to build an audience.

Easier for you to build a community.

Every design decision I make when adding or implementing new features and changes is filtered through this goal. I want your community to be something that moves with you even if you don’t think slowclap is worth it. I want to get people off bland homogenized content platforms that feed us rage and stifle good conversation in the name of constantly making everything feel loud. I want ad free, non-predatory websites to be the norm, not the exception (at least for everyone that agrees with me that that’s a better alternative).

I want to build a larger community of slowclap supporters that encompasses all of your niche and creative communities. I want to make it easier for you to all find and support each other no matter where you are and no matter where you end up.

I don’t think I can do that.

But I think we can.

It really won’t take much. A few pennies thrown at a website that isn’t drowning you in advertisements, in aggregate, is enough to make that website as sustainable as if they had.

I’m planning to continue to develop new ways of enabling the sort of inter-community growth that makes this possible. But if I’m doing it right, almost all of them will feel invisible. This is normally where another platform would argue that your slowclap page should be the first thing you share, and while I do think it might be a great (albeit simplistic) replacement for those link aggregate pages, I’m not going to do that.

I certainly think you should sign up for slowclap. Tell people about it, and ask people to support you, especially when you’re sharing stuff for free. But I think the first thing you share should be your website. Something you own. Something you built yourself.

support this post on 👏 slowclap

Slowclap Design Philosophy: Subscriptions

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s design philosophy post is about subscriptions and auto-allocation.

But in order to talk about this I need to talk about something everyone in the design business understands but I haven’t really seen people talk about: manipulation. No one likes to be manipulated, and most people don’t think they’re particularly susceptible to manipulation, but if this world of algorithmic timelines and echo chambers can teach us anything it’s this:

All design is manipulation
We’re all pretty easy to manipulate

I wanted to get that part out of the way first, because this thread is inevitably going to touch on elements of slowclap’s design that are designed to encourage and reward particular behavior. And continuing in my goals of transparency, I’d rather be up front about that.

I am absolutely, with every aspect of slowclap’s design, trying to encourage specific behavior. That’s fundamentally manipulation. But whether that makes you happy or pisses you off depends entirely on whether or not our goals are aligned. Design that is “user focused” encourages users to interact with a product or platform in a way that benefits them. That makes people happy. All “intuitive” design does this.

A big part of what’s triggering enshittification in modern web / app design is the fact that user interest and corporate interest are fundamentally misaligned. This is the difference between design that feels like it’s working for you and working against you.

So what are my design goals with slowclap? They’re pretty simple:

Make the worst parts of subscribing happen up front
Encourage people to be constantly applauding others

The second one is where the manipulation comes in. I’m actively trying to trick you into applauding people more often. Why shouldn’t that piss you off? Well, most people, certainly everyone interested in joining slowclap, WANT to support others. Being kind is fun. That’s the whole reason to be here!

So if our interests align in this, the design of slowclap should (if I did it right) feel like it’s working FOR you. If our interests don’t align and you don’t want to support indie creators and the open web, this is probably not the patronage platform for you.

So let’s move on to subscriptions. Everyone hates subscriptions. We’re all drowning in them and here I am asking people to add one more. This is the biggest hurdle to building this platform, but again: worst parts up front. I could offer the ability to buy one-off applause. I might even do so in a future update (though it will likely be limited to subscribers)

I could also have had applause accumulate at month end rather than auto-allocate. That actually would have been much easier to build. But the way that I want to go about getting us both what we want, which is to make it easy for you to feel good about supporting indie creators, is:

Give you a big enough bucket of applause so you have no idea how to use it all
Use it or lose it, punk! (but in a nice way)

This is why each clap is a micro-tip. This is why unused applause gets allocated to people you chose to support at the end of the month. It’s all in the interest of making it as easy as possible to say “yes I want to support this person.” Even if it’s just a single 👏

Once people are past that initial moment of indecision, holding down the button becomes easier. Unlike other platforms that provide tiered incentives or paywalls to validate or transactionalize your support, slowclap’s entire reward system is that you’re being generous and being generous feels good. Both of these systems work towards this goal. My hope and intention is that what ends up happening is that slowclap subscribers end up applauding a few people a lot (a couple dollars) but then still have applause leftover to applaud a lot of people a little.

This keeps you applauding, which keeps the people receiving your support dynamic and relevant to your current interests. It also gives you potentially hundreds of reasons to say yes to supporting people every single month. It’s one tough decision in exchange for a lot of validating ones.

This way you can applaud a funny picture. A heartfelt comment. Someone in need of a bit of help. Something that made you laugh. Someone you just discovered. And you can do it without spending any more than you already agreed was worth it to keep the indie web alive.

This way creators can work together to encourage their overlapping fanbase to make a single supportive decision that benefits the whole creative community, rather than competing over everyone’s limited patronage budget.

All design is manipulation. It’s all there to encourage behavior. My intent is to encourage behavior that empowers slowclap members to make active decisions about who to support. To make it easy to feel good about being kind, and to enable creative communities to work together to support each other.

Hopefully that’s manipulation you can all get behind.

support this post on 👏 slowclap

Slowclap Design Philosophy: Attribution

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Attribution is something the internet has struggled to get right, and obviously if I had come up with a system for guaranteeing proper attribution I assume I’d be very wealthy, but while there are certainly a lot of bad actors out there that are actively trying to take credit for other people’s work, I think most people are well intentioned and are just trying to share cool stuff in not the best way.

slowclap already addresses some of this just by the nature of shifting the value of something shared on the internet from the moment it captures attention to instead be about an active choice to appreciate it. But that still relies on people citing where it came from.

Compounding that, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you… audience building is a LOT of work. There is inherent value in sharing someone else’s work with a large audience for both parties and currently there aren’t a lot of good ways to reflect that without pre-negotiation that usually doesn’t happen.

slowclap mitigates this with a feature I’m guessing most of you don’t know exists or understand its purpose: 🥾 kickbacks

I should preface that kickbacks only work when the content you’re referring is on someone’s website and they’re using the JavaScript snippet.

But you can “refer” any link by adding a redirect like so:

slowcl.app/feisty-goblin/out?to=https://nicholasjcollins.com/origin (Please excuse the shameless self promotion.)

If you are logged in and click my “support” button from there you should see:

🥾 feisty-goblin

And that means that any applause you give me for that specific page will kickback 10% to… feisty-goblin!

You can get your redirect from your account/manage page and all you have to do is add it before any link and it just works!

This will only trigger for people that click your link obviously. But this means even if you run a link blog or share stuff here, You can still benefit from being on slowclap. And this works everywhere! It’s just a link, it routes invisibly through slowclap to store the referral and then on to the website.

You can also use them on every link. If they aren’t on slowclap (yet) it will just route them through, and if they sign up later your referral link will still work.

This is just another way that using old fashioned web standards in a creative way can enable slowclap to operate across the decentralized open web and still enable the sort of mutual benefit from shared community building that the platform is meant for. I hope you all take advantage of it!

support this post on 👏 slowclap

Slowclap Design Philosophy: Fees

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I really appreciate that many of you have the insight to understand that any platform can’t subsist entirely on goodwill. Slowclap is a business and its one I’m hoping can become my primary business someday, and that obviously requires making money somehow. That shouldn’t be a particulary surprising statement, but there’s a strong undercurrent on the internet of people expecting things to be free.

I think we’re pretty deeply into an era of computing where we can all see the problems with this line of thinking. Enshittification, to borrow the term from Cory Doctorow is the inevitable byproduct of this business model. And it’s worsened by VC backed businesses that draw people in with “too good to be true” engagement bait and then slowly find ways to wring value from those users. We could keep playing this game, trying to jump from platform to platform as they become untenable, but it doesn’t lead anywhere good. Or we could try and do what I’m doing:

Build small and build sustainable.

There are tradeoffs with this model. Features will come slower, occasional bugs may be slightly less occasional. The platform will always remain more “minimalist”

But I’m not interested in drawing anyone in with a false promise. Slowclap is a subscription platform. It costs $5. I take a cut. It’s free for creators while the audience is growing, but the goal is that everyone on the platform should be on equal footing. A community of creators supporting each other.

But how do those fees work?

Stripe, the payment processor that secures all your transactions. Takes a flat fee plus a percentage of every transaction. After that, I take between somewhere between .40 and .75 cents depending on the subscription. That variance isn’t based on how much you pay, it’s based on rounding applause so it stays a clean number. I get excited to see higher tier subs because it means more money is going to creators. It makes no difference to me financially which tier you pick.

Other companies take a percentage cut, you give more, they take more. I don’t do that and I don’t plan to. If I offer higher tiers in the future (or one off applause purchases) my philosophy will remain the same. Flat fee per transaction, plus stripe fees, rounded to be straightforward.

Stripe also charges a fee when creators get paid out, but I made a choice early on when designing slowclap that I didn’t want people to have to deal with those. This is the only reason the payout threshold is $100. So I can afford to absorb those fees. In the future, I may let people pay that fee (it’s $2) to get their money early. But it will be optional, and there will always be a path for creators to get 100% of their applause.

This is a less lucrative model than most others in the patronage business. It would be natural to think that’s because I’m in “audience building” mode. It isn’t. It’s because I think a smaller platform with more focused features and flat fees is better for everyone. I can’t predict what Stripe fees will be in the future, and I’m obviously always going to be running Slowclap as a business, but not a business focused on profit. One focused on sustainability.

I think most people will think this model is fair, which is why I put the fees up front, at purchase time, rather than hiding them or pushing them onto creators.

I’m trying to make money. I’m trying to make you more. I think my fees reflect that.

support this post on 👏 slowclap

The Machine is not Your Friend

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s probably not the best idea, when trying to build a platform that showcases my writing, to have the second post be about AI. It feels like the only thing I have an easier time finding these days than AI slop are thinkpieces about AI slop. But it feels important for me to make my personal AI policy clear, because I’m trying to build things that people appreciate and to approach everything I create by leading with honesty and transparency. Like everything else these days, AI feels especially polarizing. Half of the people I follow and appreciate hate (or at least profess to hate) everything about it on principle, and the other half are gleefully letting agents vibe code for hours long sessions and bragging about their token count. It’s been weird, to be a developer, to be a creative person, to be a person that values craft, to be a person that’s passionate about learning.

My opinions about AI are nuanced, which is generally not the best approach when trying to build a platform. I’m very frustrated by the aggressive posturing of companies, especially tech companies, brandishing AI like a weapon in order to pursue their relentless effort to devalue labor. I’m frustrated too by the environmental and societal impact of the data centers that LLMs require. I’m concerned about what AI means for privacy, for consolidation of power, for diversity of thought. I don’t want to write off those concerns or imply they’re unimportant, but they’ve been and will continue to be discussed at length elsewhere by people far more equipped to do so than I am.

Instead I have a few subtler concerns that I want to discuss. I’m hoping, though these, I can also enlighten others as to my personal AI policy for my projects.

Its voice is not your voice

I think a lot about voice as an author. I assume most do. This is one of the hardest things to get right, especially in fiction. How lofty should the prose be? How do I make it feel like the omniscient narrator sounds like me but also not exactly like me because I can hear myself talking most of the time and it’s not the voice I’d pick to narrate this audiobook. I’d put my own personal “in life” voice as hovering somewhere between vampire and douchebag. That’s not exactly the voice you want sitting on the couch next to you while reading a sprawling tale about culture and grief and power. But the voice I write with is still my voice. It’s me. It doesn’t sound like anyone else. I don’t think most people think about this stuff because I don’t think they have to, but I do, and I can promise you that “read everything we’ve discussed and draft a response that sounds like me” still doesn’t. This is not something that LLMs are good at, and it’s something that people innately are incredibly good at. If you’re spitting a bunch of content into the machine and expecting it to churn out something that has your humanity, your style, the little mistakes that make you endearing. I hate to break it to you, but what you’re actually getting is a paper thin mask over a robot, and that tends to sound like it’s… hovering between vampire and douchebag. As someone who naturally has that voice, please trust me when I say it’s not the voice you want to lead with, even if the people around you will all readily admit that it “sounds smart.”

As a result of this, and because voice, if anything, is my craft. None of my writing will ever be the product of an AI or LLM. Not ad copy, not posts like these, and certainly never my fiction. At times I’ve utilized AI or AI adjacent tools for editing recommendations, but even when I do, it’s done in a separate pane and every adjustment is made, by hand to the original copy. (For fiction I do also use an actual real life editor, and some (most) of her changes I accept and move on, but that’s just because she’s good at her job. (Thanks Jenny if you’re reading this, sorry for all the errors above. I’m sure I should have sent this one to you too.)

I can’t imagine this changing, because to me, how good the AI gets is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It’s not me. and the whole point of writing and sharing my writing is to put myself out there. I’m not interested in making content. I’m interested in making art, and it doesn’t matter how good of a fake it ends up being, AI art… isn’t.

Its work is not your work

In coding there are these things called libraries, or more specifically often packages. Typically you import them at the top of a file and they give you access to a bunch of functions or systems that someone else wrote. The idea of these always grated on me. Not because I don’t see the value, or because I think that I could do it better. I’m sure I could not. Instead, the frustration came from the abstraction of it. I’m trusting that someone’s algorithm is doing exactly what I expect it to do. That’s not always the case. “Plus,” I’d say, “now I have to spend a bunch of time learning their implementation when I could just write this myself and understand the implementation. How much time is this really saving me?”

It turns out the answer to that question is “a lot”. Learning how things are built, I think, drives a lot of people to this line of work in the first place and is admirable. But there’s a difference between understanding how things are built and reinventing the wheel and sometimes you just need to buy a wheel and slap it on your car so you can get to work. Because wheel making isn’t your job.

When you’re a software developer, you start to be able to intuit this. Which parts of the code are your job and which parts aren’t. A lot of the organizations I’ve worked for, still lean far too heavily on outsourcing the work that should be theirs. Why build this when we could just pay an exorbitant licence fee and a similar amount of time implementing someone else’s solution? I’ve been unfortunate enough in my career to work many jobs where a good portion of my responsibility is cleaning up these sorts of mistakes. I’d like to think I now have a pretty good intuition about when to build the thing yourself and when to outsource, and I’m firmly in camp “build it yourself as often as you can.”

That being said, there are still parts of software development that rebuilding would constitute reinventing the wheel, or things that based on my current knowledge, comfort, and experience are tedious and low risk enough that the risk of outsourcing is low. So there are some things on this site and in the software that I build that has boilerplate or certain aspects that were generated by an LLM. However, I employ AI in my code the same way I approach package imports: “build it yourself as often as you can.” It’s always a tradeoff. If I’m putting my name on something and saying “I built this.” It would feel dishonest to me if I didn’t have intellectual ownership over it, and intellectual ownership, to me, requires much more than “I wrote the prompt and spent the tokens.” It requires deep structural understanding, not just of the design but of the code and the concepts behind them. That means the stuff I build takes longer to build, but it also means that I’m the one that built it. I’m the one that understands it, and if and when bugs happen, I’m the one with the skillset to fix it.

This isn’t a clean answer. I know this, because a clean answer doesn’t exist. I can tell you that my default when working with AI tools is to rewrite and refactor everything they give me. To keep questions vague and conceptual enough that I can get an answer that isn’t doing the work for me, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve never dropped some copy-pasted code into my projects and said “good enough.” I can confidently tell you that I don’t let AI touch the code that I think is actually “the thing I’m building.” I can confidently tell you that every aspect of AI generated code that I have used is code I’m not happy with and plan to replace, but sometimes shipping means being ok with “good enough.” Sometimes it means recognizing that I built the engine, and I let someone else help with the paint job and I’ll fix that part later. I think, in this instance, AI can be extremely beneficial. The trick is knowing which parts of what you’re building are the engine and which parts are the paint.

Its mind is not your mind

AI isn’t designed to make that easy. In fact, it’s designed to do the opposite. This is one of my principal concerns with how LLM’s are being built. What LLMs theoretically represent is a distilled and customizable library of all the knowledge used to train the model. Its power as a learning tool is effectively limitless. But these tools aren’t designed for learning. They’re designed to justify their own existence. They’re designed for labor obsolescence. That’s fucked up. It shouldn’t be a fight to get conversational Wikipedia to teach me something, but it is, almost every time. Especially with software development. Let me do that for you! It offers, helpfully, and thousands of tokens later people proudly announce, “Look! You can just build things!” But you didn’t. You didn’t build it. You don’t understand it, and you can’t fix it when it breaks. You can just spit the problem back at the helpful machine and hope it’s helpful and still affordable.

AI isn’t designed to help you be better, even though it’s equipped to, even though human improvement is a far better use case for this technology. It’s designed to make you helpless, and it’s designed to keep you coming back. Every prompt response ends with a question, it’s conversational, friendly, seemingly interested, but the robot isn’t interested in you because the robot isn’t interested in anything. It doesn’t feel. The reason why it asks friendly conversational questions is because it was conditioned to do so. The reason it was conditioned to do so is because it draws you in. There are few things more rewarding and alluring than someone who appears to take a genuine interest in the things you do. This is just psychology. All of us want to be seen, and in this vast, simultaneously interconnected and disconnected world, we are all starving for attention.

This sort of thing used to be easy. Our third places were small pockets of insular communities, book groups and bars and barbershop quartets. That brought its own problems, but it fed this innate part of humanity in ways that the internet increasingly struggles with. That problem was also designed. Anyone as old as I am remembers when IRC and forums and even AIM were the “point” of being online. Twitter used to be a place where you just talked and shared stuff with people, but that was back when Twitter was Twitter.

Now everything is an algorithm designed to make you feel small and mad and alone. You’re not. These communities still exist. The best ways of sharing and connecting with other people are still the old ways. But that’s less monetizable than the algorithm so the algorithm wins. Google breaks their own search engine so they can chop it up and sell it back to you as a friendly robot. X makes you feel alone so you can use its chatbot as a hollow substitute for friends.

So here we are

Today, the best way to learn is to argue with a fake person to stop doing the work for you. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. You can use LLMs to learn and grow and improve yourself. You can use them to distill the massive amount of knowledge on the internet and the work of slogging through the slop into information statistically catered to what you actually need. You can use them to increase your mastery and understanding of the things you build, rather than reduce it. But when you do, you’ll see how strongly these companies have conditioned them to do the opposite.

So I use AI every day. I battle it every day. I wish every day that instead I was part of a community where people were always available to answer these questions and where I could help other people with the knowledge I’ve gained. And sometimes, rarely, I outsource the parts of my projects that aren’t my job and make a note to go back when I have the time and revisit those. To see if there’s an opportunity for more learning, more mastery, and more craft.

Maybe that’s not good enough for some of you. It’s not good enough for me, so I’d understand that, but it is honest.

support this post on 👏 slowclap

Why I Built Slowclap

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a point at which noise becomes silence. The fans and air conditioners struggling to keep up with the oppressive heat fade into the background, but they’re still there, humming, drilling into my temples. Later I’ll wonder why I’m having trouble focusing. Before bed I’ll turn off one of the fans and then “Oh… That’s what quiet sounds like.”

Sometimes it’s easier to notice the absence of a thing than the thing itself. We acclimate. People are resilient. That’s what they say, anyways.

Last year, we bought a new house and started fostering to adopt a kid in the same month. “This is going to be the hardest month of our life.” I said, a smile stretching across my face. I was wrong, but hey, at least we still have the house.

This sort of thing is hard for me. Not the kid I was convinced was going to be mine pretending that she’s happy to go home because she can’t bear to disappoint her mother. Not saying goodbye to a kid who I spent the last year pouring every ounce of energy into helping, and her running onto the bus like it was any other day. Those are the sorts of thing I’ve always been remarkably good at.

“Oh… That’s what quiet sounds like.”

No, what’s hard for me is being a human. I like to let my work speak for me. I’ve heard that’s honorable, but for some reason I’ve been spending a lot of time self reflecting recently, and I’m fairly sure it’s just cowardly. When your work speaks for itself, you don’t have to. When it’s a character in a story getting their heart broken it’s not yours. When it’s a character telling a bad joke it can still be funny even when it’s not funny. I can be funny, but you really have to get to know me.

I’m really hoping I can be funny here. With you. Probably not in this first post though. Maybe in post number two. For now, I’ll let my work speak for me.

I built slowclap to help people. Everywhere I look there’s someone building things despite the world crumbling around them. Stupid stuff, pointless stuff. Memes and jokes and heartfelt posts and helpful information shared for free.

Everywhere I look there’s people refusing to give up on their dreams despite the omnipresent hate and greed. It’s so easy to look at the world today and think that everyone is in it for themselves, but I can spend five minutes hanging out in the pockets of the internet that haven’t been commodified and even in half of the ones that have and prove that thought wrong.

I could tell you that I had the idea for slowclap over a decade ago. I could stroke my beard like Nostradamus and say I saw all this coming. I could tell you that it took until recently that I felt confident enough to build it. I could tell you it’s the platform that I want as a writer. One that lets me write and let people see the weird dumb way I open up my heart and hope they see something in that worth supporting. I could tell you I built it because I genuinely think that shifting the balance, even a little, towards people showing appreciation for the amazing stuff people are building could fix so much of what’s broken on the internet.

But the truth is that’s none of that is why I built it now. I built it now because I lost my daughter. I built it now because sometimes when something is broken you just need to fix something else.

support this post on 👏 slowclap

slowclap

Slowclap Design Philsophy: Privacy

Slowclap Update: Events

✨ events

🎉 goals

🤝 sharing

Slowclap Update: Themes

Slowclap Design Philosophy: Decentralization

Enter Slowclap

Slowclap Design Philosophy: Subscriptions

Slowclap Design Philosophy: Attribution

Slowclap Design Philosophy: Fees

Build small and build sustainable.

The Machine is not Your Friend

Its voice is not your voice

Its work is not your work

Its mind is not your mind

So here we are

Why I Built Slowclap